Man on an Edge

The unforgiving pavement of Greenwich Street unspooled half a dozen stories below. But Brent Weingard, who had strapped himself into an olive-green harness and attached himself to a canvas belt that in turn was attached to a hook on the facade of No. 55, seemed oblivious to the fact that gravity was not his friend. Dangling outside the oversize double-hung window, the belt his only protection, Mr. Weingard didn’t bat an eye.

Silhouetted against a large swath of the West Village, he squirted blobs of Joy (“my grandmother swore by it”) into his bucket of water, razored off hard-to-remove grime, and sponged away cascades of dirty water with the fuzzy multicolored mops that he calls porcupines, using microfiber cloth for the corners. Moving as gracefully as a dancer, he finished up with crisp, meticulous swipes of his squeegee.

By the time Mr. Weingard crawled back into the apartment 10 minutes later, his bucket was brimming with black water, testament to how filthy a New York window can get in just a few months or even weeks, especially a window hard by highways. But he finds scrubbing away grime deeply satisfying.

“I like working with squeegees and water,” Mr. Weingard, 55, said as he stepped carefully about in his black Red Wing work boots with their no-scuff soles. “Washing windows is dirty work because the city is so dirty. And to be honest, I don’t think the work is all that healthy. But I love it.”

Mr. Weingard is the moving force behind Expert Window Cleaners, a company that he started nearly three decades ago as a political science student at Columbia University and now operates out of his Yorkville apartment. He had been introduced to the craft when his globe-trotting father, who worked for I.B.M., moved the family for a time to house-proud Holland, and young Brent watched window washers at work. Some years later he bought his first professional equipment; today he works in some 1,000 buildings a year. His strong right arm is his team of 10 assistants, mostly from Ecuador and Guatemala.

The city’s high-end residential buildings are his specialty, and he’ll go anywhere — to Greenwich Village town houses, to glass towers like the Post Toscana on First Avenue, to Upper West Side grandes dames like the Ansonia. His clients, especially the downtown variety, are a roster of the rich and/or famous, among them Lenny Kravitz (Mr. Weingard remembers the pile of guitars in a corner), E. L. Doctorow and Monica Lewinsky. He can tell tales of the van Goghs and Picassos he has seen and of apartments so vast he has gotten lost.

The tools of his trade are simple, even homely — the porcupine mops, the squeegee, the dropcloths, the faded towels (laundered daily), the bottles of purified water, the stubby green stepladder. But with half a dozen jobs on a day that typically starts at 8 and goes until 6, his schedule is complex. Making his way around congested city streets, the eternal search for a parking space (amazingly, he always seems to find one), struggling to show up at the appointed hour (or apologizing profusely when he’s running late), not trekking dirt onto a client’s floors or splattering the new curtains — sometimes washing windows seems the least of it.

This morning Mr. Weingard was working solo at the century-old Archive, where he has been a regular since the building opened as a luxury rental complex in 1988 with nearly 500 apartments. “This was my first building,” he said, parking his powder-blue minivan across the street. “The super, George Wagner, was a friend.”

Photo

Mr. Weingard, armed with his trusty bucket and other gear, restored the view of the skyline at the apartment of the artist Eleanora Kupencow in Brooklyn.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

To this day, Mr. Weingard still pries open recalcitrant windows using an ingenious iron contraption that Mr. Wagner invented and christened the window popper.

Lugging his stuff to an apartment being readied for a new tenant, he suited up in his belt and harness, cautiously made his way onto the narrow ledge just outside the glass, attached his belt to hooks on the building’s facade and set to work. If he has an audience inside the apartment, however, he will tell stories gleaned from decades of viewing the city from a distinctive perspective.

“I remember the time I got stuck outside this building,” he said as he wielded his squeegee. “It was winter, the window was closed, it got stuck and I couldn’t get it open. Then it started snowing.” Gingerly, he made his way across the ledge to the window of the apartment next door, pried it open, stepped in, buzzed the intercom, “and Walter in the lobby rescued me.”

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“And of course everyone mentions Kundera,” Mr. Weingard said, alluding to the author of the novel “The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” with its surgeon-turned-window-washer protagonist. Though he once met a girlfriend through a customer, he has never wound up a job by popping open a bottle of Champagne and enjoying an amorous moment with a client. His work has, however, led him to cross paths with a number of people who have become part of his life, among them his doctor, his lawyer and his dentist.

Happily for him, he has no stories about sudden attacks of vertigo. If he suffered from acrophobia, he said, he’d be in another line of work, “because that’s something you don’t outgrow.” Plus, he is attentive to safety and a regular at the meetings of the International Window Cleaners Association, the industry’s trade group.

Because New York is tougher than most places when it comes to washing windows — the traffic, the congestion, the pollution — city window washers use a variety of techniques to get to where the dirt is. They clamber up scaffolding. They use ropes to rappel down the sides of high-rises, an approach that most are loath to discuss or have abandoned because city regulations sharply curtailed the practice. Like Mr. Weingard, they work as much as possible inside an apartment, using what is called belt work only for hard-to-reach exteriors.

Ivor Hanson, the author of the memoir “Life on the Ledge: Reflections of a New York City Window Cleaner,” is intimately familiar with the world Mr. Weingard inhabits. All the glassy new towers translate into business. “But when times are tight,” Mr. Hanson said, “people wash their windows less often, so there’s more pressure on the window washer.”

As the city has grown more affluent, the social dynamics have changed also. “People are fussier,” Mr. Weingard said. “They get upset if they can’t get an appointment right away, or if the guy is five minutes late.” There’s also less chatting with the customer; usually, a domestic worker or a doorman escorts Mr. Weingard into an apartment. Today, he said, most people have their windows washed once or twice a year, paying him an average of $20 apiece for normal double-hung windows, more for larger or more complicated installations.

Like many window washers, Mr. Weingard does not plan to do this sort of work forever. Crouching and balancing become tougher; the lightning-fast reflexes needed to prevent falls slow down. Mr. Weingard sees himself retiring to his family’s farm in the Allegheny Mountains.

But for now, he regards washing the windows of what he calls “my buildings” as something of a calling. “Because why live in New York,” he said, “if you can’t look out the window and see how beautiful the city is?”